Do our tools serve us or do we serve our tools?

Quick post here - I find myself repeating the question in the title rather regularly these days.

Case 1

This tweet appeared last night:

President Biden @POTUS

I’ve formed a new Cancer Cabinet, which will be convened in the coming weeks. They will drive the whole-of-government effort to unleash every possibility within our power to end cancer as we know it.

PoliMath expressed concern:

PoliMath @politicalmath

There isn't "a cure" for cancer because cancer is a million different problems with how cells grow But, more than that, I'm worried this will make things worse. A lot more people have cancer than know that they have cancer. Some could be saved but some cannot.

To elaborate, so part of what you might get from such a “whole-of-government” effort is a massive testing campaign to identify anyone with the tiniest trace of the disease, throwing scores of people who thought they were (and really are) perfectly healthy into panic because they got a positive test result, and… oh, this is all starting to sound very familiar.¹

And then, more so for cancer than for COVID-19 perhaps, some of those same people will be pushed into (or will demand themselves) “treatment” or mitigation that will cause them more harm than the disease.

Ivan Illich was perhaps the prophet of our times. I’ve shared a little, but you should really just read his book which talks about all the ways in which a medicalized society is debilitating to, broadly and so properly conceived, human health. (There was also a recent First Things article on Illich’s thought, appropriately critical of Illich for being sometimes hyperbolic to make a point, I think. But that article makes a good quick introduction to Illich.) Especially relevant here are some of Illich’s comments about how, in a hospital, patients become their charts… health isn’t defined anymore as “I feel healthy”, it’s “what do the tests say?”. Except now that problem is not confined to “people in hospitals”, we seem to desire it to be everyone everywhere all the time. Quoting Illich:

Diagnosis always intensifies stress, defines incapacity, imposes inactivity, and focuses apprehension on nonrecovery, on uncertainty, and on one’s dependence upon future medical findings, all of which amounts to a loss of autonomy for self-definition. … Once a society organizes for a preventative disease-hunt, it gives epidemic proportions to diagnosis. The ultimate triumph of therapeutic culture turns the independence of the average healthy person into an intolerable form of deviance.

Still impressive to me that he wrote that in the 1970s.

This is not my field, so if you know better please correct me. But, because you are constantly being exposed to things that could cause cancer (if I put a radiation meter in your hand right now it would click every few seconds, just sitting in your home²), I have heard it said that everyone over age 50, it might be said, “has cancer”. But for many of them it just doesn’t matter, because it’s controlled by your body, or growing very slowly, and you aren’t immortal, and you’ll be dead of old age before it would become a problem. Would we improve the lives of all those people if we started them on often-harmful-themselves cancer treatments instead? Obviously not. To quote PoliMath one more time (sorry the language):

PoliMath @politicalmath

Think of how COVID testing works and imagine if, having tested positive for COVID, the solution wasn't for you to isolate for 5 days but for you to start a round of chemo That is the kind of clusterfuck we could be seeing out of this project

Do our tools (medical testing and other medical tools in this case) serve us, or do we serve the tools?

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Case 2

Let me share a little tweet from Rick DeVos here.

Rick DeVos @RickDeVos

If you don’t see and feel the disgusting gravity pulling the Management of these systems towards inevitable roll-up you’re ngmi.

He was responding to this article, AAA Endorses Driver-Monitoring Camera Systems. The problem is that our self-driving cars are good enough at driving themselves that the driver might stop paying attention, but not so good that it is actually safe for the driver to stop paying attention. So how do we make sure the driver keeps paying attention? The endorsed solution is to have a camera in the car constantly monitoring the driver. Exactly what the consequences would be for not paying attention are unclear, but it’s easy to imagine a system that begins doing nothing but “beep beep beep” if it thinks you aren’t engaged morphs, perhaps quite quickly into our day, into a system that dumps data to third parties (corporate or government) who could no doubt think of all sorts of delightful ways that they could punish, reward, and nudge you around with that data.

But I find it difficult to support any entity that’s encouraging the use of driver-facing cameras while consumer privacy is evaporating faster than a snow cone on the sun. It feels genuinely crazy that the solution to the failure of driver assistance features is putting a camera inside of every new vehicle so that the driver can be monitored in real time. If the systems worked as advertised, none of this should be necessary. This also opens the door to new privacy violations at a time when automakers are already transmitting your driving data back to base and dipping into your phone whenever possible.

Do our tools serve us or do we serve our tools?

1. It is not the point of this post, but it might also be said that this is the state realizing that “health” is really a great control mechanism. It’s parallel to climate change in a way, but better. You can claim almost anything somehow affects the climate, so if we must “control the climate”, that’s a great excuse to control anything and everything. Similarly because (as the state of California has taught us) just about any human activity or product could be said to have some affect on cancer rates, a “war on cancer” is another great tool to control everything. And “people are dying! If you’re against our control, do you want people to die?” is a tactic more easily deployed for a war on cancer. And, since you can never actually “cure” either problem, you never have to declare success and give up the control.

2. This gives me an idea, in our safetyism culture, for a “low uranium dust content building supplies” company. We could make so much money.